Basic Crocheted Shape Formulas

1. Intro to Basic Crocheted Shape Formulas: Hi, welcome to my classroom. I'm adding, and I'm gonna be teaching you how to crochet basic shapes. In this course. I'm gonna be going over the basic formulas for that and don't be scared. I know formulas is kind of a mathematic term, but there's not a lot of math involved and whatever is involved is pretty simple. So don't let that scare you. It's not that daunting. Once you have these basic shapes down, you're gonna be able to make your own patterns pretty simply because you'll find a lot of these basic shapes can be turned into a lot of different things. As I said, I'm going to be going over the basic formulas. But of course you can tweak things to how you need them to create the shape that you're specifically looking for for your specific project. This is a topic that's being requested if Neil a lot. And so I hope that you find what you're looking for in this course and it's helpful for you. I'm gonna be going over three simple shapes today, spheres, cylinders and cones. And you're gonna find that those shapes can create a lot of different projects for you. If that sounds good, Then come along with me and let's crochet. 2. Spheres: So we're starting out with the most basic of crochets shapes. This sphere. Pretty much everything that I crochet has some version of a sphere in it. We're talking about circles or ovals, stuff that can be perfectly round or somewhat smushed. Today, I have three examples that I'm going to show you to go along with the formula so you can kind of understand how the math works with it. So I have three shapes here, varying circle degrees. You're going to see that this yellow one is not a perfect sphere. It's almost an oval. This is where I started and this is where I ended. So it's kinda was smushed sphere. The white one is more of a perfect sphere. It's a little bit smushed. Depending on how you stuff, things, things can look more or less like a sphere. This one fits nicely in the hand. It's pretty circular and this is pretty average in terms of size when you're looking for the gray example is somewhat smaller. I would say this one is probably the most perfect sphere to me and it really all comes down to The increase, the decrease, and how many rounds in-between there are. I'm going to try to show you a little bit more as I draw it, what I mean by increasing and decreasing and how that affects your sphere. To help go along with the formulas I'm giving you. We are looking at how to get this shape. And what it comes down to is how quickly you increase, how long you stay the same for and how quickly you decrease. So the increase and the decrease, we're going to want to stay the same. So whatever you do to get the top of this sphere, you're going to want to do the opposite for the bottom. In the examples that I gave you, I will show you what I did with these formulas. So you can decide based on the way that mine lock which one you'd rather do. So again, I'm going to show you my sphere. So here's the gray example. So this was n plus two, all the way around. The White example right here. It's almost a sphere. This was n plus one. Then my yellow example here was just n. So this is the most squished out of all of them. So you can see the way that they're less spherical or more spherical depending on what you're looking for. This is n, n plus one and plus two on how spherical they are. So that's how I do spheres, and I hope that it helps you create ceasefires of your own. 3. Cylinders: Next we're moving on to cylinders. These are probably about as simple as the spheres are, if not more simple, because we're just going to go as far as you want with the sphere. And we're just trying to figure out how big we want them. A lot of the time when I knew cylinders, I do them. So they have a closing at one end. You can see it better with the yellow example. I don't know what I'm doing trying to show you the smallest one. As you can see, this side is closed and the site is open because I ended with this sudden I start with this side. You can cast on as many as you want this cylinder to be. And just two single crochets all the way down and you'll have a cylinder. I tend to do the closed side because with cylinders, people use them a lot of time for bodies are arms. So e.g. I'm going to use a sphere in patterns. And I do this all the time. Use a cylinder as the body. So you can see that it sits nicely on there and it already has the bottom so you don't need to do a cover for that. And it looks like a head and a body. Another big major thing that people do with cylinders is used them for arms and legs. And that's another reason why I like to have them closed off. That would be one huge lake, but you can still do it. The only way really to decide how big you want. This is kind of up to what you think, the pattern that you are trying to make needs. And you'll learn how to do that by trial and error loss to the time with a lot of the pieces that I do, I tend to do this same beginning number of stitches so that everything has around the same size. This one was also started with six single crochets, but I wouldn't do it this long if I were doing a leg, I'd probably do about half that. So just to there. So it would look more like a leg and less well, unless you want like a sock monkey kinda look which you can do. It's really up to you on what you're trying to make this thing look like. You're going to learn that a lot. It's going to be up to you with a lot of this on where you're trying to get the shape to go. It's like sculpting with yarn. So you're going to learn what works best for you with these formulas. And you can create pretty much anything with these shapes. I'm gonna go over this a little bit more in drawing format so you can see what I mean. But someone nerves are pretty basic. The understanding of them is pretty basic. Cylinder, so these are pretty simple. We're basically looking at how long we want them to be. We're increasing rapidly on this. If you're looking to do a closed-off cylinder, but if not, we're doing a chain all the way around. And just focusing on the length. And length is honestly really up to you. I believe I did not. I did different links for these. Actually, this one is two times the number of rounds that I started with. Long. This one is just n plus one amount long. And this one is about two times as long as well. The difference that I'm showing you here in terms of these cylinder examples, are how much, how wide you want your cylinder to be, and how far you go with that. If we're going by length, that goes, it goes this way. I was going by thickness. But for coming by length that goes this way, you can of course, elongate that make it shorter. It's really up to you on what you're looking for. The biggest factor in how cylinders look is of course, how wide or how thin they are. These are really this size is pretty good for a really chunky leg. This size is good for like a body. This size is good for a very neutrally spaghetti arm. You can use cylinders for a variety of things. You can even use this for neck. If you're doing a giraffe or something, It's really up to you on how you want to do those. So now that you understand cylinder is a little bit more, Let's move on to the next shape. 4. Cones: So the last shape I'm gonna be going over today are cones. And though they do seem simple, they're a little bit more tricky. Then spheres or cylinders. With cones, It's a little bit more difficult to figure out how wide you want it to end up and how many increases you gotta do to get there. Unless you're looking for a band in your cone, you're going to be doing an even increase all the way around. If you want a bend, then you're going to be doing it offsets. So what that means is you either increasing or sometimes decreasing in one specific location. Here my examples, I have 12.3, the gray one is bent. And the reason why that is is because when I was crushing this one, I did all the increases on one side. The rest of these the increases were all put on the first part and then the left and then the middle part. So they're evenly spaced across the entire cone. For the other two, this one, I just increased on one side and you get a bend. That way you can kind of get a bent tail or a crooked hat. It really is up to you on what you want to use that shape for. I use that a lot for then two tails or horns. I guess you could do that for these cones. You can even bend it yourself. Because as you can see that one was straight. This one you can still bend. You can bend them pretty much however you want and then use stitches to hold them in place, to hold the bend in place, or you can just leave them straight. These are both the same amount of rounds, obviously because of the same height. But this one only had one single crochet added to it every round and this one has two. So it gets wider as double a pace as this one does. These ones are a little bit harder to give you formulas for because you can make all different kinds of shapes with cones. And it really depends on how wide or how thin you want your code to be. If you want a shape on it, I can give you the formulas for all three of these, and it will give you varying degrees of cones. You can tweak them. You can do for you, for very big cone. You could do less. You could do odd number, even number, whatever you want. And the cones will always turn out just interesting ways. So I'm going to show you a little bit more about how cones work in picture form. So the last shape I'm going to show you here are cones. Like I said, while I was showing you the examples. How much you increase, at what rate you increase is really going to change how your cone looks. You can get a really thick cone with faster increases and a very thin cone with slower increases. This is increased by one, this has increased by two, this is increased by three. All of the cones that I did as examples, they're all as long as each other. But how much I increased them. Sorry, It goes like this. For the one-two-three, how much I increase them is really showing you the difference also with to the where you place the increase is important. So if we're doing a top-down view, because I only increased on one part. So at the very beginning, it curves like this with these two where I increased, Well, I only increased on one part in this one, but because it's so thin, you can't tell. With this one I increased in two locations that we're equidistant to each other so that it stays nice and flat like that. This one, you can straighten. But you can also bend like that first one because I did it all on the one side. But it's not it's not as solid as this one. So this one, if I wanted it to stay bent, I'd probably have to sew it like that and reinforce it like that to make sure that it stays like that. So I hope that helps you a little bit with how you construct your cones. 5. Making Shapes Work for YOU: Of course, the main reason that I'm giving you these formulas is so that you can get those shapes to work for you and your patterns and projects. This means you're going to need an eye for shapes and how to mesh things together, but don't worry, that will come with time and experience and playing around with what you know. Don't be discouraged if you have to make a specific piece more than once because it happens. I do that a lot. There are many pieces that I've made that I had to completely restart because the head wasn't the right size with the body or the arm wasn't the right length. Just it happens. You have to do it by trial and error. Sometimes, the more you do that, the better you'll be the next time. So let's play with some of the shapes that I gave you. I already did the white sphere on the yellow cylinder. If I look at this, the gray cone, even though I do like that, It's bent. It's a little big in my opinion. You can have different opinions. I mean, obviously. But I think yeah, I would go with the white tail on that. So we've got a cute tail. I'm going to use these gray cylinders. If I can get these pins to work as sort of arms and legs here. And it's going to be sitting down. There you got. So there's a very basic shape. You can make smaller spheres, I think, and make a little ears to go on top. I think that would be q. You can finish it here. Put eyes on it. You could do a little frill down the back and make it look kind of like a dinosaur. You could also, instead of doing this one, do more of a smushed sphere and have it tilted like that. So it looks like it's looking up and it's got a bigger head. That's another version. You could do something a little bit more interesting. I don't even know what I'm doing, I'm just playing around, but something kinda fun that doesn't even look feasible. But you could do something like that. You can just play around with shapes, like a snowman with a hat. Just random, random things. You can make a lot of different things with these shapes. And I hope that this course has helped you with the basic formulas of these basic shapes. I challenge you to make a project using only spheres, cones, and cylinders. And to post below, because I love seeing your guises work. Anyway, I want to thank you for watching this course and for following me. I know it's been a long time since I've posted anything and I do appreciate your guys support with everything that I do. I hope you had fun in this course and that you will continue to have fun crocheting. It is a journey and I'm glad to have been part of yours. I'll see you next class. Bye.